Reliability analysis for sluice gate anti-sliding stability using Lévy stable distributions

This paper is aimed at developing a statistical method to analyze the static and dynamic reliability of sluice gate anti-sliding stability. The proposed method investigates the static reliability by using a modified Monte Carlo method in conjunction with Lévy stable distributions, and the dynamic reliability is analyzed via the temporal scales of water level signal which is detected by the detrended fluctuation analysis. We exemplify this Lévy-Monte Carlo strategy in the evaluation of the anti-sliding stability of the Yongji second sluice gate. The simulated failure probabilities are less conservative than the existing results given by the first-order second-moment method and the maximum entropy principle. We also find that the tail distribution of water level signal obeys an asymptotic power law and its increment process can well be depicted by the linear fractional stable noise model.